I rent a PO box in the local U.S. Post Office. I was picking up my mail the other day and the thought struck me that the U.S. Postal Service is indeed an odd duck.
It should be the darling of the Constitutional Party because it appears in the original Constitution of 1789 and hasn’t been amended out.
It should be okay to those who are fiscally cautious such as yours truly because it charges user fees as part of its ongoing operations. Big government is always the better choice, folks should embrace it. Some complain that it loses money, but there’s no branch of any level of government that was supposed to make money. Businesses are.
The Green Party must hate it because trees must be pulped to make junk mail. The junk mailers love it because how else would they make a living?
The USPS must love itself because it makes its only bundle off junk mail. Plus, people just like the “old-timeyness” and togetherness of standing in a long slow line to buy a tiny piece of paper to stick on another thing made of paper that they then hand in person to a real live human being to throw in a bin.
There is just something comforting about that in this impersonal age of no customer service. Golly, there’s just something comforting about the entire affair as long as you don’t think about it too much.
They do fly Old Glory out in front of the place. God forbid that someone should come up with a more sustainable way to communicate via paper.
Thomas Edison, by all accounts a genius, did envision that the telephone would be included in a business model where customers would install a phone, make a call to an operator who would put the message to paper and have that sent via messenger to be hand delivered to the recipient to read and then dispose of. Maybe a bit too quaint by half for us in this advanced age of email.
Which leads to the question of what to do with the snail mail bureaucrats. If Uncle Sam sold the physical plant, he could net a nice capital gain because he doesn’t owe any taxes to himself on sale of real property.
That would be a nice one-time cash boost to the Treasury now wouldn’t it?
Then he could stop funding the blame fool thing and just ignore the fact that it’s in the Constitution because nobody in power notices when the Constitution of 1789 is “interpreted” to fit modern 21st century situational ethics anyway. Right?
Then we could have a mail delivery system for those who still need its services that’s solvent and self-sustainable.
One that is off the federal budget and not being funded by increasing the debt of the U.S., which gets sold to foreign sovereign funds to milk us bowlegged over the next decade or more of interest-only payments before Uncle Sam gets our principal back for us, which has been heavily eroded by his own inflation in the meantime.
How about that – make a capital gain to pay down the national debt and eliminate the ongoing yearly operational cost by taking the whole thing off of the national budget.
Who woulda thunk it?
Miles F. Holden, Kirkland
